Friction and Preconditioners

Abstract

Many structural analysis problems are concerned with friction contact phenomena. These problems are difficult to formulate and even more to solve because they are governed by multivalued tribological laws and some numerical resolutions can lead to unsymmetric operators. This last disadvantage becomes crucial for very large problems involving three dimensional discretization and time evolution. This paper shows how to use a simple mixed formulation together with an efficient preconditioned generalized conjugate gradient algorithm coupled with a multilevel interpolation technique when dealing with frictional contact problems.